A few years back, Arizona jewellery designers Randy and Janie Polk were struggling to make ends meet. Randy traded gemstones with fellow hustlers in smoky hotel rooms. He liked the bright stuff, the ‘gumdrop colours’, he tells Anthea Disney for the Observer Magazine of 6 June 1982.
When ‘some young hustlers brought him a bag full of purple rock’ from South Africa, Randy ‘didn’t know what it was. I just thought it was pretty, like grape juice,’ he reminisces. ‘Everything I made in purple or lavender sold quickly, so I was interested.’
And on edge. His four-year-old daughter had been critically injured in a car accident and he was struggling to pay mounting hospital and care-home bills. As he cut and polished the purple rock, he dared to dream: ‘It had all the qualities we look for in a gem: beauty, durability and rarity.’
Randy followed his hunch and sold everything, including his wife’s engagement ring, their stereo and his gun collection, to pay for a ticket to the manganese ore mine in South Africa. The miners, writes Disney, ‘had “liberated” the coloured rock… by taking it out in their lunch boxes.’ Randy went one better: he emptied his suitcases, filling them with what would turn out to be ‘$20-$30m worth of gem-grade stones’.
Back home, he set the price for a mineral he’d by now named Royal Lavulite. ‘I was taking the biggest gamble of my life.’
It paid off. The mineral, a rare strain of sugilite and ‘a freak of nature to be found only in one mine in South Africa’, was classified as a rare gem in 1980. Randie had cornered half the world’s supply, with an estimated value of more than $50m before the gem peaked.
‘He is rapturous about his newfound prosperity,’ says Disney. And yet. His daughter died last year. Their 10-year-old son misses his sister. ‘I’ve learned that fairytales do not come true,’ reflects Randy. ‘Sometimes I think I’ve lost more than I’ve acquired… Maybe there’s no such thing as a happy ending.’
